Rapping With Paul White

Paul White

Rapping With Paul White - Fairly Good, Based on 6 Critics

Resident Advisor - 80Based on rating 4.0/5

80

Paul White is a South London based hip-hop producer who easily could have been cast aside in a world full of press releases that abuse the phrase "post-Dilla." But rather than just pairing blunted beats and cracking, off-kilter snares, he's steadily amassed a growing fan base by injecting a psychedelic, disjointed and quite often humourous take on the genre. Previous work has seen him plundering prog and psych for his dense productions. Rapping with Paul White is him trying something completely different.The album takes seven mostly unknown MCs and inserts them into White's strange dreams.

[b]David Starkey[/b] will have a coronary if he discovers this south London producer. He’s a white man crafting beats behind street-level odes to marking out territory from the likes of Detroit’s [b]Guilty Simpson[/b] and [b]Marv Won[/b], plus others, and he draws on a cornucopia of cultures to do so. Latin, Middle Eastern, African and, worst of all for Starkey, freaky German (NOT THEM!) Moog music rears up on a seductive record that reveals itself in layers.

In case the album title's got you thinking otherwise: Paul White is not a rapper. He's a producer from London, a designation that, these days, might bring to mind dubstep and UK bass-- but despite some enthusiastic co-signs from publications that orbit around that scene, White ain't part of it. He works in sticky, abstracted hip-hop rhythms coated in THC resin; 2009's The Strange Dreams of Paul White, one of his earlier full-lengths (all of which can be heard on his Bandcamp page) found Captain Beefheart bumping up against weirded-out boom-bap.

For the past couple of years, Paul White has been building a steady brand through instrumental hip-hop releases, most notably through his excursion of psychedelic rock samples, Paul White and the Purple Brain for Now-Again Records. His sound is very similar to Madlib’s, which is no small praise. He doesn’t have any production totems, preferring to browse through all of his music collection and figure out how to make beats from anything, whether it be rock, soul, reggae, classical or found sounds.

South London producer creates hip hop for the nerdy soul. Marcus J. Moore 2011 "We don’t know where we’re going to, but we sure make a lot of noise getting there!" That seemingly random statement, taken from Paul White’s new album, depicts perfectly the enigmatic south London producer, whose affinity for dusty instrumental loops and arbitrary verbal recordings make him a working class hero to crate-digging DJs, and a psychedelic dream-weaver to conservative listeners.

Paul White is a very common name. The most prominent Paul Whites make up a small club: one was a twentieth-century cardiologist, another the news director of CBS during World War II, a third worked as a missionary and was known as the “Jungle Doctor,” a few more are sports stars, among others. Paul White, the south London-based producer of often lilting and manic beats, is an outlier among other noteworthy Paul Whites, mostly because of his profession but also because he seems to choose obscurity over recognition.